EA apologizes for April Fools’ Day tweet bashing the Wii U

Sarcastic call-out of "the most powerful Gen4 platform" called "unacceptable/stupid."

One of the first rules of good humor is that you should always punch up, not down. Someone at EA seems to have forgotten that rule when it used April Fools' Day as an excuse to tweet a few jokes at the expense of the struggling Wii U.

Yesterday, the official Twitter account for EA's Frostbite Engine—which powers everything from Battlefield and Need for Speed to Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare—pushed out a (since-deleted) message openly mocking the hardware power of Nintendo's latest console. "Frostbite now runs on the #WiiU since it is the most powerful Gen4 platform, our renderer is now optimized for Mario and Zelda," the tweet read. Other tweets from throughout the day reportedly joked that the engine would power Half-Life 3 as a "#WiiU exclusive" and soon support "zero latency connections... exclusively on the #WiiU."

After those tweets were deleted, EA COO Peter Moore took to Twitter to offer the company's regrets. "Our apologies to partners @NintendoAmerica & fan @FrostbiteEngine’s poor attempt at April Fools not condoned by EA : unacceptable/ stupid."

Nintendo is a bit of an easy punching bag these days considering its dismal Wii U sales and financial issues. Still, it seems a bit classless for a game publisher to revel in a platform holder's problems, even on April Fools' Day. At least EA has apologized for the blunder.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.